DOOMZX
Fight the classid Doom enemies with the standard arsenal of weapons in this 2D ascii art Doom game. Now with gamepad support. X = Fire weapon, Y = Reload, A or B = Enter Menu, L1 or R1 = switch to next weapon.
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Last modified 2018-08-31 18:06:36
NOTE: This review was written for version 1.2 and may be outdated.
First off, I admit a bit of a bias as I've been eagerly anticipating this game's release while watching Verasev develop it on the Discord server. I must also admit bias as someone for whom the release of the original Doom was a defining event of the '90s.
That out of the way, this is an absolutely excellent game that is worth every minute of your time. The ASCII art graphics are put together well, and the game nails the feel of DOOM while being very much its own thing. The music (taken from Doom 64) and sound effects (taken from the original) fit in very nicely.
The game has a unique Storyline which I admit I haven't seen all of yet, but seems worth seeing through.
It has some flaws, most of which the author is already aware of and has promised to fix for following episodes. One notable one that lets down the shotgun weapon is that it does a fixed damage to each target it hits, instead of doing a damage per pellet. As such, it's less useful against large monsters than the original weapon was in Doom.
Give this game a try! One of the best MegaZeux releases to come out in a long time.
First off, I admit a bit of a bias as I've been eagerly anticipating this game's release while watching Verasev develop it on the Discord server. I must also admit bias as someone for whom the release of the original Doom was a defining event of the '90s.
That out of the way, this is an absolutely excellent game that is worth every minute of your time. The ASCII art graphics are put together well, and the game nails the feel of DOOM while being very much its own thing. The music (taken from Doom 64) and sound effects (taken from the original) fit in very nicely.
The game has a unique Storyline which I admit I haven't seen all of yet, but seems worth seeing through.
It has some flaws, most of which the author is already aware of and has promised to fix for following episodes. One notable one that lets down the shotgun weapon is that it does a fixed damage to each target it hits, instead of doing a damage per pellet. As such, it's less useful against large monsters than the original weapon was in Doom.
Give this game a try! One of the best MegaZeux releases to come out in a long time.
Link
Last modified 2018-09-05 05:13:56
NOTE: This review was written for version 1.3 and may be outdated.
DooMZX is looks nicer than Doom XD
DooMZX is looks nicer than Doom XD
Link
Last modified 2026-01-25 02:40:42
I am impressed by the extent to which this actually feels like Doom / Doom II. Everything from the pressure of avoiding being swarmed when encountering huge clusters to cycling through different weapons to manage multiple ammo stacks just fits right at home with running the originals under DOSBox on modern hardware. This is also a really good showcase of all the different 'weapon types' already available from MegaZeux's built-ins, with each weapon in the game extending from a different one.
The difficulty feels evenly spaced throughout most of levels 1 - 5, though I would have added just a couple of quality of life features to smooth over what unneveness there still is-- a quick 'get off me' move to scatter enemies if they completely surround the player character at the expense of a small amount of health, and more visible 'screen effects' for when the player character is getting towards extremely low health (or taking large hits of damage at once) as I find a lot of the time even if my guy's not out of options, it's not as clear as it should be when they should be taking cover to restock in the middle of a firefight. The health and ammo balance is at least precise enough that retreating into the corner without leaving the room entirely to get the stimpacks and armor shards makes a difference; it would make more use of the effort put into that balancing if there was a red screen flash and/or colorization effect for these! I also would have definitely preferred if there was a tiny little 'clink' sound that plays whenever the player tries to shoot when out of ammo-- something that would help the player reload sooner as well as help reinforce the habit of reloading right before running out of ammo (by recognizing when they start not hearing the 'clink'). I also find the HUD a bit hard to read, being on the right hand side, while in the middle of combat at the same time-- having the ammo counts, weapons, keys, and the player's 'damage level' indicator on the four corners of the screen would have worked much better.
...but that's it, that's all I can nitpick about this. The complete lack of enemy 'sprites' and using only capital letters to represent them is a deliberate, conscious choice that only makes more and more sense the further one digs into the game. This is one hell of a gameplay over graphics type game-- pun intended.
The difficulty feels evenly spaced throughout most of levels 1 - 5, though I would have added just a couple of quality of life features to smooth over what unneveness there still is-- a quick 'get off me' move to scatter enemies if they completely surround the player character at the expense of a small amount of health, and more visible 'screen effects' for when the player character is getting towards extremely low health (or taking large hits of damage at once) as I find a lot of the time even if my guy's not out of options, it's not as clear as it should be when they should be taking cover to restock in the middle of a firefight. The health and ammo balance is at least precise enough that retreating into the corner without leaving the room entirely to get the stimpacks and armor shards makes a difference; it would make more use of the effort put into that balancing if there was a red screen flash and/or colorization effect for these! I also would have definitely preferred if there was a tiny little 'clink' sound that plays whenever the player tries to shoot when out of ammo-- something that would help the player reload sooner as well as help reinforce the habit of reloading right before running out of ammo (by recognizing when they start not hearing the 'clink'). I also find the HUD a bit hard to read, being on the right hand side, while in the middle of combat at the same time-- having the ammo counts, weapons, keys, and the player's 'damage level' indicator on the four corners of the screen would have worked much better.
...but that's it, that's all I can nitpick about this. The complete lack of enemy 'sprites' and using only capital letters to represent them is a deliberate, conscious choice that only makes more and more sense the further one digs into the game. This is one hell of a gameplay over graphics type game-- pun intended.